On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.” (John 20.19-21)
In Shlomo Breznitz’s 1993 book, Memory Fields, the Jewish psychologist recounts his heartbreaking experiences as a young boy in an orphanage in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Placed there with his sister Judith by their parents for safekeeping just hours before the parents were deported to Auschwitz, Breznitz tells of his constant fears as Nazi officers periodically searched for Jewish children in the orphanage. His memoir tells of cruelty, fear, and courage.
Early in the book, before the harrowing experiences that awaited him in the orphanage, he recalled a particular incident. He writes, “A day in autumn is engraved in my memory as one of fear. The walnut trees in the garden were already bare, and so were the big chestnut trees in front of our house. I was coming home, and just before I reached the entrance I was intercepted by geese, who would not let me pass.”
“The lead goose was particularly ferocious, and every time I tried to sneak by she would extend her long neck, open her yellow beak, and, squeaking at the top of her voice, run after me, ready to bite. The rest of the flock followed her lead, storming me from all sides. I knew that a boy my age should not be scared of geese, but I was so terrified I couldn’t move.”
“Thus surrounded I waited for help. It was getting cold, and I started to shiver. I had given up all attempts to get to the house and did not initiate any movement, yet the geese stubbornly stuck to their advantage and stayed put. Sometimes, after a long pause, the lead goose would try to break the standoff with a sudden threat, to which my only response was a defensive lifting of my foot and emitting a meek cry. Terrorized, I now had tears streaming down both cheeks, blurring my vision.”
He writes, “After what must have been a long time Judith, on her way home from school, found me in total despair. She laughed and took me by the hand. The geese made only a half-hearted attempt to hold their ground against the reinforcements, and finally I reached the safety of our home. It was on that cold autumn day that I first experienced the paralyzing effect of fear.”
His story recounts powerfully the debilitating grip that fear holds over the human psyche, draining us of our energy, demoralizing our sense of self, and paralyzing any attempt to move forward. With invisible chains, fear tethers us close to the ground where we crouch, cower, and cry out, unable to breathe, incapable of moving.
The evangelist John, with an economy of words, describes for us the fear that the followers of Rabbi Jesus felt in their bones after his humiliating scourging and horrifying crucifixion at the hands of those who held the power in Jerusalem. He writes, “On the evening of the first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst.”
That the doors were locked describes the depths of their fear, locked doors always a sign of fear, unlocked doors always a sign of freedom. With little to no effort, we understand immediately the deep-down fears of these followers of the Galilean, living–as we do–behind the many locks that we use everyday in an effort to assuage our fears. Locked cars. Locked apartments. Locked hearts.
Looking at the number of locks that we employ daily, there is little doubt that we live in fear of a good many things, barricading ourselves as best we can behind locks large and small in an effort to keep harm away from us, the larger the lock the safer we feel. Fear turns us all into prisoners, whether we are behind bars or not, locked in and locked away as we are by the devices we think will save us.
This is not to say that our fears are unrealistic or unreliable. Often, there is every reason in the world to be afraid. Self-preservation is wired into our psyches for a good cause and, faced with a danger, our automatic response is fight or flight. Eons later, the response is still the same, even if dinosaurs no longer pose a threat. Other dangers–just as sinister–lurk around the corner.
So, it was for the same reason that the followers of the Galilean had locked themselves behind doors, just as we do today. But the point the evangelist wants us to understand is that the Risen Lord comes to us, unhindered by locked doors, and stands before us, wanting us to have the same peace that he offered to those first followers, an assurance that all will be well, even if we are scared to death and shaking in our shoes.
And we will be well, regardless of how things turn out, because he never leaves our side. “I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you,” was one of the last promises that Rabbi Jesus made to his followers, and as the text shows, he was good for his word. Locked behind the boulder of the tomb, he broke free, freed from death by the power of the Most High God, and he desires the same freedom for each of us.
Newly risen, his first stop was the room where his followers now huddled behind locked doors, a tomb in itself, and he would not be hindered by a shut door, but, as the evangelist says, “came and stood in their midst,” showing them and proving to us that we are not alone. As Judith took the hand of her younger brother Shlomo and led him through the danger that had him immobilized, so the Risen Christ takes our hand and walks with us, at our side through it all.
And it is not that he has no understanding of our fears. As the evangelist makes clear, the Resurrected Lord shows his followers his hands that still carry the marks of his own frightening experience on the cross, in that gesture proving he also knew their fears and offering an assurance to them that there is life on the other side of fear.
Perhaps St. Francis de Sales, a cleric and writer of the 16th century, expressed it best in these words, “Do not look forward to the changes and chances of this life in fear. Rather look to them with full hope that, as they arise, God, whose you are, will deliver you out of them. He is your keeper. He has kept you hitherto. If you hold fast to his dear hand, he will lead you safely through all things; and, when you cannot stand, he will bear you in his arms. Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow. Our Father will either shield you from suffering, or he will give you strength to bear it.”
Listening to his words, we find in them the same Easter assurance that the Resurrected Lord offered to his followers in that locked room where they hid, imprisoned by their fears. As the evangelist tells us, he breathed on them, the primordial symbol of restoration of life, recalling the origins of life in the breath that the Creator breathed into the human formed by his hands from the dirt of the earth.
Filled with that breath of life again, as he had been when resurrected from the tomb, he opened the locked door and said to them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Released from their fears by the spirit of the Most High God that flowed again through their bodies, they went out of the room, stood in the streets of Jerusalem, and announced to any and all the good news that God does not want us to live imprisoned by our fears.
It was the same message spoken throughout the pages of the sacred texts of the Hebrew scriptures, now spoken by the one sent by the Most High God into a world tethered to fears, “Do not be afraid,” the words asking us to hope, to trust, to believe. In other words, to unlock the doors and to walk in the world with the knowledge that we never walk alone, but walk with one who takes our hand into his own hand.
In the early 1960s, a social worker in Cleveland told of an incident in which he saw the brutal incapacitation that fear brings to people and how he sought to alleviate it so that those imprisoned could walk freely again. He describes the event in this way: “If you went into that house it was like going into a coffin. The people were white and they were pale, and they had blue numbers on their arms. That house smelled like death because the people were scared to go out, and they wouldn’t let anybody come in.”
He continued, “They only let me come in because I was the man with the money. The woman had been in Auschwitz; the man had been in some other less well-known camp. And somehow they survived. Somehow they had married. Somehow they’d come to Cleveland. Somehow I was the government, and I was a kid.”
Continuing, he describes the experience: “Of course, I’d known about the war. I’d had friends at school in Harlem who had been refugees from Germany. But I had never seen this evil in its face that way before. After a while, I gained their confidence. One day I heard–I swear to you this is true–scratching inside a closet, and I asked, what is that in that closet?”
He tells us the answer. “And then I opened the door and there was a kid in the closet. The worst-looking most malnourished kid I ever saw. It was their child, and they were afraid to bring that child out of the closet because they thought Hitler would come from the grave and burn that child. I said, you can’t do this. You can’t inflict the pain of history on this child. I will help you find a school for this child. And I did.”
In that moment, in that space, that social worker did as the Resurrected Lord did on the evening of that first day of the week when the doors to that coffin-like room were locked where the disciples were. He said, “You can’t do this. I will help you. And he did.”
For us who live in a prison of fears, whatever the name the evil monsters in our lives carry, the Resurrected Lord speaks to us the same words, saying to us, “I will help you.” And he extends his wounded hands to us and leads us through the opened door towards freedom, towards new life.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 